Sparkblog

I'm heading to beautiful Vancouver this evening to attend the Canadian Open data Summit Tomorrow! I'm very excited to be able to give a lighting talk about open data and how we can make it even better!

GeoJSON is a great format, easy to read/view/use but one thing that really stands out is the verbosity of numbers and its effects on file size. Yeah in rare cases it “may” be needed but I’m pretty sure a length that is precise to, well less than a millimeter (example: stream length: 6849.41980435 meters) is never needed. And the other pink elephant in GeoJSON is the number of sig figs used for geometry!

It is not uncommon for raster data to be large and unruly. Creating tiles is one way to deal with these large datasets and speed up rendering. This post introduces a few handy tools for dealing with raster data while walking through the process of combining multiple raster files to create tiles for a super-overlay for a nice clean visual output that renders more efficiently (particularly in Google Earth). All from the command line.